This is my talk given at AbilityNet’s Accessbility 2.0 conference in London today. In it I am talking about how we try to sell accessibility and the mistakes we make while we do so.
Ever since I started working for Yahoo in England I’ve been lucky enough to recommend a lot of developers I wanted to work with for ages and get them hired to work here. One thing that annoyed me a bit is that we only took on very skilled and experienced developers. I consider a good team not to be people that are very very good but also a team where new developers can come in and grow with the rest of the team, learn from the others working on real projects and thus having a steady, maintainable, healthy flow of talent coming in replacing those that leave or want to move into other positions.
Now we get the chance to do so. If you are a web developer and you want to work with the very skilled people here in the west-end of London, check out the official job description below and send me a CV. Just comment here and I’ll mail you directly or send a mail to onlinetoolsorg@gmail.com.
Here’s the official job description:
As the world’s number one Internet brand Yahoo! delivers news, entertainment, information and fun to over a half billion people every day. Our European web development team, based in London, is seeking standards-savvy front-end developers to work on Europe’s busiest sites.
You should be able to provide examples of your work showing use of progressive enhancement techniques (e.g. unobtrusive scripting), and clear separation of structure, presentation and behaviour layers.
You will work closely with Information Architects, Visual Designers, User Researchers, Software Engineers, and Product Managers to ensure that our web based products in Europe provide the best possible experience for our users.
Last Thursday I went to the Google offices in London Victoria to attend a bi-monthly unconference called Open Source Jam. I was running a bit on autopilot as I was in Leeds the day before talking about the YUI at the Geekup meeting and originally wanted to skip the session as I was pretty knackered. It was great though that I didn’t follow my instinct, but instead have a nice unconference with Pizza, Beer and lots of 5 minute+5 minute Q&A sessions revolving around creating interfaces for humans.
In comparison to other barcamps the Open Source Jam was a lot more technical and speakers were more coders than web developers. I’ve learnt about a chess program for the iPhone, how to write APIs to make them more accessible to humans, UXON - a User Interface Object Notation (more on this coming soon), Behaviour Driven Development, holes in the Flickr API and a lot of other things.
My initial idea of staying for an hour and then leaving for a speaker’s dinner of a company-internal conference was foiled and I took the last tube back from Victoria.
My own talk was a preview of a session I will give at the Abilitynet Accessibility conference in April, talking about how accessibility is not an extra task but – if taken into consideration from the beginning – an opportunity to build better products for everybody.
I want to thank the organizers and will very likely be there for the next jam.
Photo by Adewale Oshineye
The last few years we’ve become increasingly better in building applications that make our life easier. May that be collaboration, day-to-day tasks like writing, converting or just managing our tasklists – a web app to make it smoother for us as end-users was always available with a minimum search effort.
Meanwhile, in the real world, social problems became worse and worse. This becomes even more problematic as there is a distinct lack of forward thinkers providing easy to use and apply solutions to existing problems. This is where the Social Innovation Camp wants to bridge the gap.
In London between 4th-6th April 2008, Social Innovation Camp will bring together some of the best of the UK and Europe’s web developers and designers with people at the sharp end of social problems.
Our aim is find ways that easy-to-build web 2.0 tools can be used to develop solutions to social challenges.
Until then, the organizers are calling out to you for ideas:
For the next month, we’ll be accepting applications to come to the event via the website – www.sicamp.org. The plan is that people will fill in our ideas submission form with details of an idea they have for socially-beneficial web tools. This process will close on 7th March 2008 and we’ll choose the best to come and join us in April.
I’ll be one of the technical advisors on the panel and I am very much looking forward to seeing what web geeks can do to change the world around us rather than just the virtual ones.
If you are in or around London on the 26th of February 2008, come to the De Hem’s pub in Covent Garden to celebrate two years of YUI. There’ll be cake, beers, videos from the YUI bash in the US, a quick update by me and schwag to take home.
